Architecture: Big square deal

The prizewinning space around the Tower of London has opened up a whole new vista  even for jaded London eyes, says Hugh Pearman

I’ll be honest: the fact that somebody has been making a new London square had passed me by. A place as big as the middle of Trafalgar Square, comparable, perhaps, with the restored courtyard of Somerset House? How could I have missed that? Easy: this new public space has been concealed in a long-term package of improvements des-cribed prosaically as the Tower Environs Scheme. Which tower might that be? The Tower of London. Londoners never go there.

They might now. A sequence of understated modern buildings along one edge is coming into use, £14.5m has been spent, and it looks good. Tower Hill, which used to be a confused collection of tacky buildings, kiosks and a rat run of a road, has had a benign, ordering hand swept across it. It has become a calm, even austere, urban space. It has opened up uninterrupted views of the western flank of